The third library seminar will introduce the citation indices in
general and the Web of Science in particular. This tool is based
on the concept that papers cite earlier relevant papers. If you
know of a particularly good article that relates to your topic
(perhaps cited in your text book) this search tool allows you to
identify who has cited the classic article in the years after it was
published. Thus, you can determine which articles
have used a particular reference in the past five years by looking up
the
paper in the Science Citation Index.
The Web of Science can also be used for subject searches. The subject search covers a much larger literature but it may produce many more less relevant results because of this. GeoRef, which we examined earlier, focuses on the geoscience literature as does GeoScience World which can be found at the bottom of the Ejournal Finder Page. .